views a month. >> success was measured by the number of eyeballs on your site. back then, the numbers were good. with hindsight, however, there was another problem which they didn't recognize. >> people are simply coming to reading.com, getting their news, going away. >> that kind of low-level engagement just isn't good enough to grow a website. silas needs his customers to be loyal members of the site. to be ambassadors, spreading the word, and even to be busy bodies sharing their views. >> hey, there is value in people sharing content. value in people commenting, all of those things are really strong indicators that, okay, now we're getting more engagement. >> for big trendy cites sites like facebook, youtube, twitter, engagement is considered the key to growth. how does a small low-tech business get people to interact and be engaged. >> policing words like loyalty and participation with engagement. we want to look at a more

wholistic view on how people behave. >> gabe zwickerman knows a lot about engaging customers. he says people will pay attention to your brand, if you challenge them and give them incentives. >> feedback, friends, and fun. those three things are what consumers and employees actually want. >> in other words, make your website feel like a game, where people get rewards for becoming involved. something marketers like gabe call gameification. >> starbucks loyalty program, work, frequent flier miles. >> this company helps businesses like silas' build customer engagement with this kind of game mechanics. >> really, you don't want passive consumption of messages, right. you want people actively going out and doing something with your brand.

that's what game ification sits. >> to get people genuinely involved, you need to offer a reward so special, it's unavailable for sale anywhere. >> let's say are you part of the lady gaga fan club. one of her top 100 fans, and she gives you a choice. i'll give you $100 or insider access to my tour diary nobody else has. and i can guarantee you, the insider fans will take the access to the tour diary. >> if you have a restaurant, making sure that person can always get a reservation, even on new year's eve. that doesn't cost you any money, but it's really valuable to the customer. >> since sigh lass isn't a rock star and doesn't run a restaurant, he has to offer something to offer his customers that makes him feel special. >> one of the people who first

thought of the applications for game mechanics beyond the traditional game environment. >> he suggested letting the readers vote on each other's postings so they could identify whose was most respected. >> a little light bulb, number one, one person thought his comment was insightful. >> by using this reputation system, the idea would be that entire community could work together to determine who should we pay attention to. >> each commentator gets more votes, they receive trophy badges. letting other readers know who is most popular. this in turn gets others engaged and it begins to feel like a game. >> whenever we engage with any kind of system, we ask what's in it for me? you better have a go ahead answer for that question, or it's empty and meaningless and people won't stay engaged. >> that kind of community recognition can be highly valuable, but it's also something that can't be bought for money.

>> we were hitting little under 1 million page views per month at that time in '06. and today over this summer, we crossed the 6 million mark. it's been a very rapid increase in how much people are actually using it. >> part of what gaming is doing, we need to give people discounts to get people's business. there pays off in the form of advertiser revenue. >> implementing what we did, we saw about 25% increase in the volume of comments on our site. >> it doesn't replace the need to make a great product, but a great product alone is insufficient to cut through the noise in today's market. gamei finfication isn't for anybody. we have the cofounder and chief operations officer at dopamine.

he drives engagement with playful games. adam rich, cofounder and editor of chief at thrill list.com. overseeing content for the men's life-style brand. and daniel pink author about books on the changing world of work. "to sell is human." great to see all of you. mike, we've heard about this a lot. foursquare, a big deal. what put it into our psyches. if you don't think back to what they are saying in the piece about boy scout badges, et cetera. it seems this is tricky. in order to get it right, you can put badges on, do a couple of things on thrill list, get a badge. get another badge and then you become a super trill lister. how do you get people to care about being a super thrill lister? >> you have to have a great product to get people engaged into what you are doing. one of the magics with game

strategy is thinking about the strategy. you can't pepper on badging, leader boards. you have to think about theov overarching strategy. do you want readership, people buying your product, people coming to shop more at your store. find a way to enkocourage and ince incentivize people. >> do you think you can get someone to do something that they wouldn't already have been interested in doing? so, for instance, it might be interesting on my website to get people to share stuff a lot and they are not sharing a lot. now can i suddenly put game mechanics in and get them to share? >> i would absolutely say no. i think it's really a question of having that be a layer on top of the service or the -- the value you are already providing. and really thinking about why the reader would want to share.

what's in it for them. ultimately that needs to be a service also. >> how hard, dan, how hard is something like this to do. something you can put on your site or within any kind of company that you are running pretty quickly and expect it to work? or something that takes a lot of time? >> i actually think it takes time and you have to -- i want to echo what adam and mark said about having a great product. i think there are three important essential first steps. have something great to offer your customers. have something great to offer your customers. and have something great to offer your customers. i think this can enhance engagement for products, but it can't create engagement in something not inherently engaging. the most ferociously devoted consumer brand, apple, google, zappos because they don't need to do it. >> how do you look at this and decide this is right for me or

not? how do you start? >> the first thing you need to start with, okay, what is the goal for the company? get some strong definitions of the metrics you want to improve. and understanding then what are the behaviors? what are the actions you want to really kind of drive the consumers or customers who are engaging products to achieve. that's where the creative thought comes in. how do we design a game or challenge per se to really make them think about your product or want to participate in what you have to offer. >> this can be something big or ongoing or little to get facebook likes. >> exactly. gabe said it best. friends, feedback, and fun. when you make that environment very sociable, people want to participate. >> this is such a fascinating topic. a lot of social science behind it. thank you, all, for discussing it with us. u.s. u.it's a new year. a great time to re-evaluate your small business.

five tips to make sure your home page is easily accessible to customers. courtesy of ink.com. fix content and leave it alone for a while. two. claim your google authorship. you can link your profile to the content you produce on your site. making easier for people to find it. three, write linkable content. the more people link to your site, the more people will find it. four, syndicate your content. repurpose an article on an online presentation on sites like slide show with links back to your site or post videos an your own site as well as youtube. five, stop the thieves. make sure text on your site isn't being used illegally using the tool copiscape. i suspect a lot of you out there manage people on your team or consultant who's are

programmers or engineers, and i suspect a lot of you feel like you don't understand a thing they are talking about. and this makes it tricky. when a programmer says something will take three weeks, if you don't have a background in technology you have to take him ahead his word, right? i invited joe to the joe today to talk about how nontechies can drye their i.t. team. he has a blog, very popular blog. great to see you. >> thank you for having me on. >> i hear this from a lot of people. they feel almost held prisoner by their i.t. team, because if you tell your marketing person, we need this marketing program launched, you can tell what they are doing. the i.t. team, it's like it's behind this dark cloud. no idea what they are doing. >> yep. >> how do you deal with that? >> first advice, make sure you have two phases to these projects. a design phase and an implementation phase. and i think where they usually go wrong, you just try to dive

in to building something, and you don't know how long it will take to get out of that, what you will get when you're done. >> at what point -- can you say have you two weeks for design, three weeks or clejimplementati? >> you don't know how long it will take to implement until you know what you are going to do we need a complete list of what we have to do draw the screens, figure out the pages on the website that have to work. and you can go through the items and do figure out what work has to be done. >> this is like anything, where you could be a perfectionist or get it done, put a band dade over something and make it work. how can you as a manager explain to your team, hey, we either need this to be perfect or not so perfect and know they are following through on what you want? >> i think that the most important thing there, make sure that the i.t. and developers understand the business really

that you are in. i think that there is a tendency to leave them in a box and say you need to build this for me. what you really have to do, make sure theyan what your motivations are, how important to be early versus high quality. do you want ship an early version to a small number of people. those are business decisions and the i.t. team is making and programmers will make hundreds of tiny decisions. they have to get the big picture and convey your vision or business. >> one last thing i want to talk about. you said to me it's very easy for techies, when it's an interesting project, really interested in say this is easy to do yeah, we'll do it. when a project they are not interested in, say this is very hard. it will take three months. >> yep. and you could try to put that out by seeing how interested they are. they have a little bit of control over that and that brings them into the vision, get them on the same page of the goals of the business are. maybe they have stock options or

part owner of the business and they will have the same ultimate goals and probably be interested in the same things you care about. once you get them excited about that. >> a lot of technology people i've worked with, incredibly -- a lot of these people are incredibly smart and have real vision for the way the company can move forward too. put someone in a box and say go program the site, are you missing out on a lot of fantastic ideas. >> you may be de-motivating them by making them feel like they are a plumber sort of. >> when we come back, adam and daniel answer some of your online questions. the ceo of panera bread tells us why it's important to think small in this week's learning from the pros. we've all had those moments.

when you lost the thing you can't believe you lost. when what you just bought, just broke. or when you have a little trouble a long way from home... as an american express cardmember you can expect some help. but what you might not expect, is you can get all this with a prepaid card. spends like cash. feels like membership. make sure that challenges progress with levels of difficulty by using challenges

as part of the overall system of creating engagement, you will leverage gamification and create an unprecedented connection between business and employees. >> we have created a plan based on game mechanics. on the next three weeks, we're conducting a contest on our facebook page and we would love to have you participate. this week's contest is something we can all relate to, the person with the messiest desk. want to play? go to the msnbc your business facebook page, click on the contest tab and enter by posting a picture have you taken of your own or someone else's disaster desk. we will decide which is the best and the winner will get a bunch of your business goodies, including a copy of our book and coffee mug. it always makes sense to keep up with the latest trends.

let's check in on twitter to see what hot topics entrepreneurs are talking about. robdsa abrams says, my best advice, find a really good small business health insurance broker. it could make the difference in 2013. small town rules author and your business panelist writes, the sum of our emotional and rational experiences makes a positive customer experience. and small business owner and new york times blogger says i love the cloud, but for 2012, i give it a c plus. time to answer some of your business questions. adam and dan are with us gent. christina writes i own a busy 4-year-old business sharpening naives, scissors, bone say tools and garden tools. i have increased retail sales. would it be a good decision for me to have an internet store?

i don't have any experience. >> i would recommend she not design one and find something off the shelf and let someone else deal with the nuances of that. you can go down the rabbit hole, and an e-solution can be incredible costly. >> what about starting on etsy or ebay. >> think of this as you would say an electrical utility or plumbing system. you want to do that yourself? no, have you a business to run. i would try something off the shelf and other thing, since some of her business is service business, scheduling this knife sharpenings, some kind of off the shelf schedules software. >> all right, yeah, you're right. this is sharpening. she wouldn't sell something. yes, okay, you're both right. how easy is that to find?

>> it's really easy. you listed a couple of good options there and this is a perfect place for a lot of small business owners and crafts people. >> got it. >> next up, a question about watering down your brand. >> on your show, an expert recommended aggregating other people's blogs. my question is -- does doing so dilute your image as an expert in your field? >> dan, what do you think? >> not necessarily. it depends on what you made by aggregation. there's a lot of value in expertise and you can get expertise by cure rating other people's blogs and providing contacts for other people's blogs and taking the best pieces and putting them in a what that your users and readers can find valuable. so this isn't a magic solution but expertise can be extraordinarily valuable. >> i agree. >> absolutely. i think there's a great value in being the filter. if you think about it in terms

of music it's like being a dejay. >> do you -- can you simply be a cureator? >> i think in this act you, yourself, are creating content in a whole. >> now on to a question about a adapting to new technology. >> why a small be businesses afraid of new technology as well as other businesses? new things come outing that help a business and people are very herely about doing it 'i want to know why? >> it's scary. dan, i would just say myself, there's so much coming out of you that it's hard to know what to choose. and so you sort of get in this moment of inertia. >> it seems like uds a new business, to make it easier for peel. listen, small business people, i'm one myself, you got a business to run.

and so, everything else tends to be ancillary. if you have a new technology and there's a steep learning curve, that's a pain. i think part of it is at the door the stop of technology manufacturers for not making enough products that are easily implementable off the shelf and some of it has to do with the nature of a small business where you're running around all the time and certain things fall by the wayside. >> how do you make your choices, adam? i am sure you get pitched stuff all the time that will help your company. how do you decide which ones to implement? >> i guess sort of answer the initial question and then, follow-up on yours. i think small business owners are afraid of risk and any chains kind of change introduces some risk and what's the we think about when we make decisions. the is necessary disruption of changing the way that we're operating going to pay off in a way where it's worth the risk of leaving something that's not broken. >> but even if you know you need something, and there are ten

services out there and they all provide it and they all provide it a little bit differently and you talked to your friend and everyone uses a different one, how do you decide? >> i think that what you said, talking to friends is a hugely important then and most of our technology solutions are things that either we have found from people that we trust or we've shared with others once we found them to make sense. doing the due diligence to make sure you're making the right decision with the technology provider is one of the most rigorous processes a small business owner has to take and ultimately it comes down to with your gut, how do you feel about that? how do you feel about the people you're dealing with from that technology platform or service. you're going to be partners with them. >> adam and dan, thanks so much for joining us today. if any of you out there have a question for our experts all you have to do is go to our website. the address is openforum.com/your business. once you get there hit the "ask

the show" link. if you'd rather e-mail us your questions and comments. aaddress is your busines business @msnbc.com. need a way to keep organized when you're out in the field? check out our app of the week. the form "mobi app" helps you easily gather and distribute data on multiple device. you or anyone on your team can access and fill in the forms on the going. some features include the about to record audio, take pictures, collect signatures and create sketches. ron shake started the bakery cafe concept in 1981. in 1999, he and his partner shifted their focus to panera bread and since then, that company has grown to more than 1600 bakery cafes in 44 states and canada. we sat down with ron in boston to talk about everything from maybing smart bets to the

importance of thinking small in this "learning from the pros. ♪ check it out ♪ ♪ check it out ♪ check it out ♪ we're feeling it >> we're often referred to as a captain list. i started with $75,000. what i am is an opportunist. and to me, an entrepreneur, a business owner, the greatest skill they have is the ability to see opportunities. i was working in a french bakery cafe we owned in 1983. we have guests that would walk in and say, would would you sell me that? they throw lunch meat on there. you didn't have to have a marketing degree from business school to unts that there was an opportunity for sandwiches. understanding and seeing that opportunity that ultimately we used the decision to use the breads as a platform to sell

soups with the sandwiches. ♪ panera is rooted in bread and when i looked at the businesses, panera was succeeding on a national scale. and i realized, if this was going to happen, it needed every ounce of resources we had. so i focused everything. to me, when i think about risk i don't think about the risk of screwing it up. i don't believe conventional wisdom is right. that's what people pass from one to another as if it were right. the reality is, everything in panera is by intent. here's how i think about hiring. i'm not going to be the best expert on you. you have to be the best expert on you. so i'm going to ask you a series of questions but your responsibility is not only to tell me the truth, but, also, to help me answer the question -- is this right for you? i've seen a lot of people come

and go and i can help you understand why this is good for you. if we put our heads together and engage in that conversation we may figure out what's good for you and good for us. it's okay to think small, it's the right way to think but the reality is, it's no bigger that one cafe done 1650 odd times. that's it! right? we stay focused on being the best competitive alternatives in the neighborhoods in which we compete and then we do it with scale. 1650 times and then we have success. if we ever lose it we fail. the power and capability of a small company and generally, a company run by an individual is that they can make quick decisions and they can move and they come from one lens. my advice is to small businesses owners is to use that strength in power. the big companies have scale. you have the ability to move quickly. that's what you want to be.

♪ check it out ♪ check it out ♪ check it ♪ chikt out >> go to "open forum.com/your business." you'll find web exclusive content with more information to help your business grow and you can follow us on twitter which is @msnbs your biz. and don't forget to be a fan of the show. next week, it's a challenge many small business owners face. how do you manage your inventory when orders of all sizes could come in at any time? >> we always try to project where people's minds will be at a given point in time and try to be ready for that. >> we try our best not to fly by the seat of our pants. >> two entrepreneurs will share their tips for keeping their inventory moving all while keeping their customers happening. remember, we make your business our business.

we've all had those moments. when you lost the thing you can't believe you lost. when what you just bought, just broke. or when you have a little trouble a long way from home... as an american express cardmember you can expect some help. but what you might not expect, is you can get all this with a prepaid card. spends like cash. feels like membership.

the national hockey league and players league have reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement which will end the lockout. i'm joined by freshman congressman, hakim jeffries and new york state senator, the democratic that represents staten island and brooklyn and fran o'connor, a resident of sayerville, new jersey, who is still displaced by hurricane sandy. great to have you here. on friday amp, the new 113th congress including the gentleman here at the table, hakim jeffries, approved $9.7 billion in immediate aid for victims of hurricane sandy. the 9.7 billion is a fraction of the $60 billion aid package passed by the senate that earlier this week without any explanation whatsoever, house speaker john boehner decided not to vote on before the 112th

congress ended. the decision occasioned a rare full-scale full-spectrum mutiny from in knowledge and new york republicans. on wednesday, republican kons congressman peter king of new york, attacked his follow congressmen across the country. >> i'm saying right now, anyone from new york or nmg knowledge that contributes one penny to congressional republicans is out of their mind. they wonder why they're becoming a minority party and why we're a party of. minority but what they did last night was so immoral and disgraceful and irresponsible. >> new jersey governors chris christie blamed not only his nell low republicans what he called a betrayal but specifically john boehner. >> there's only one person to blame for the victims. the house majority and their speaker, john boehner. americans are tired of the palace intrigue of political partizanship of this congress which places one upsmanship ahead of